Narratives in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake
Monsters, sex, and (dis)ease: Exploring HIV/AIDS-‘positive’ narratives in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. Dissertation Proposal submitted by Jennifer Dumoulin Ph.D. Candidate Department of Communication Supervised by Professor Florian Grandena University of Ottawa January 2019 Abstract In the world of Anita Blake, vampires, werewolves, and zombies don’t just hide in their coffins. Among other things, they go to school, have steady jobs, run successful businesses, give witness testimony, and have romantic relationships. And yet, preternatural characters are treated differently from – and by – the human characters in the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. They’re often feared and treated as dangerous, viewed as a disease and as contaminated, and seen as something to be controlled or exterminated. The treatment of preternatural characters in the Anita Blake series seems, on the surface, to parallel the treatment of people living with disability, disease, and illness in the real-world, and in particular, people living with HIV/AIDS. This similarity is, in and of itself, not surprising – many scholars have called attention to similarities between HIV/AIDS and vampires, werewolves, and zombies in the context of disease transmission, bodily transformation, and identity metamorphosis. Despite this differential, discriminatory, and stigmatizing treatment, many preternatural characters in the world of Anita Blake do not merely survive, they thrive. Using the Anita Blake series as its lens, this study examines how the series contributes to the HIV/AIDS narrative and, ultimately, what we can learn from it in the context of changing perceptions around how we as a society and as individuals treat people living with disability, disease and illness.
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